Decoding the Disciplines (DD) emerged as a pedagogic response to supporting students to overcome bottlenecks in learning. Rather than simply invoke students to ‘try harder’ or give them more content, DD seeks to better understand the nature of the bottlenecks and guide students into and through the disciplinary bottlenecks—through iterations of modeling disciplinary practice, opportunities for students to practice these themselves, and formative feedback. But can DD also be a useful approach for inter-and cross-disciplinary issues?
This paper reflects on how DD can be adapted to respond to issues of diversity and intercultural understanding. This relates to the ERASMUS+ project “Decoding the Disciplines in European Institutions of Higher Education: Interdisciplinary and Intercultural Approach to Teaching and Learning,” involving a partnership of 4 European higher-education institutions: https://www.facebook.com/decodingeducation/
The adaptation of DD to these inter- and cross-disciplinary issues presents a number of conceptual and methodological challenges: How do we define diversity bottlenecks? What kind of mental operations are appropriate? How do we model and practice these? And how do we assess them? Drawing on illustrative examples we discuss how the DD approach can be applied to consider diversity in terms of
• curriculum content (what content is included/excluded, geographical origin of content/concepts, etc.),
• students/faculty (diversity of access and participation, diversity across students and faculty, status and discrimination), and
• community (relationships within institutions, relationships between institutions and wider communities, relationships between research partners including communities).
Illustrative examples include supporting the access of economically disadvantaged students (often migrants) to learning; structuring students’ analytical reading to think ethnographically through the lens of critical theories of risk, environment and intersectional difference, including gender, colonialism, and race; etc. We discuss these in terms of translating a methodology designed to enhance disciplinary thinking to the inter- and cross-disciplinary issues of diversity in higher education. We look at how pedagogic strategies, such as using virtual learning environments and reading rubrics, can be used within the DD approach to support inclusion and critical thinking related to diversity.
REFERENCES
Middendorf, J., Mickutė, J., Saunders, T., Najar, J., Clark-Huckstep, A. E., Pace, D., & with Keith Eberly and Nicole McGrath. (2015). What’s feeling got to do with it? Decoding emotional bottlenecks in the history classroom. Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 14(2), 166-180.
MacDonald, R. (2017). 5 Deciphering teachers’ paths to their disciplinary professional explicit and available to their students. Using the Decoding The Disciplines Framework for Learning Across the Disciplines: New Directions for Teaching and Learning, Number 150, (150), 63.
Middendorf, J., & Shopkow, L. (2017). Overcoming student learning bottlenecks: Decode the critical thinking of your discipline. Stylus Publishing, LLC.
Bauer, A., & Haynie, A. (2017). How Do You Foster Deeper Disciplinary Learning with the “Flipped” Classroom?. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 2017(151), 31-44.
| Period | 25 Oct 2018 |
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| Event title | International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: Towards a Learning Culture |
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| Event type | Conference |
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| Location | Bergen, NorwayShow on map |
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